The Traitor Beside Her by Mary Anna Evans #WW2 #Coding #USA #CoffeePotBookClub

Codes: When You Need to Send a Message, but You Also Need to Keep a Secret

A post by Mary Anna Evans

My new novel The Traitor Beside Her is set among American code breakers during World War II. The British code breakers at Bletchley Park have become famous in recent years, but they had counterparts in the United States. In The Traitor Beside Her, my protagonist Justine Byrne has been sent to work undercover among American cryptanalysts working feverishly to decrypt messages sent by Axis forces. The situation is critical. Many lives and the fate of the war are on the line, but the enemy has infiltrated an operation at Arlington Hall, a real-life site of American code breaking work. Justine’s job is to identify the spy, so that code breaking activities critical to winning the Battle of the Bulge can resume before it’s too late.

Arlington Hall, a former women’s college, was taken over by the federal government shortly after the US entered WWII for use by the Signal Intelligence Service, which conducted cryptanalysis–encoding and decoding messages. This photo shows an aerial view of the campus of Arlington Hall. The two large white buildings with many wings were added during the war to those already on the college campus to provide office space for the many employees needed to do cryptanalysis, most of it done by hand in those days when computers were just being invented

Credit: Library of Congress

In my book, many of the code breakers are women, and this is based on fact. By 1944, the time when The Traitor Beside Her is set, many men are overseas fighting the war and women were placed in jobs where their presence would have been unthinkable before. According to the National Park Service, by the time the war was over, more than 7,000 of the the Signal Intelligence Service’s 10,500 staff members were women.

In 1940, one of the female American code breakers, Genevieve Grotjan, discovered a critical correlation between intercepted Japanese messages that enabled the Navy to build a machine to decrypt messages in a Japanese code that the Americans called “Purple.” Her discovery has been called “the greatest feat of cryptanalysis the world had ever known.”

Another woman working on cryptanalysis at the time, Ann Caracristi, worked to reconstruct enemy code books during the war. She and her colleagues were among the first to know of Japan’s plans to surrender. Caracristi devoted her life to intelligence work, going on to become the first woman to serve the National Security Agency (NSA) as Chief of Research and Operations and the first woman to serve as NSA Deputy Director.

I modeled the women with whom Justine and her friend Georgette Broussard worked on real-life women like Genevieve Grotjan, Ann Caracristi, and the nameless women in the photo below. I did my best to give them the kind of intelligence, drive, and integrity it took to achieve truly monumental tasks while under the life-and-death pressure of a world at war.

Credit: NSA

Sources: National Park Service

https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/the-code-girls-of-arlington-hall-station-women-cryptologists-of-the-second-world-war-teaching-with-historic-places.htm

The Traitor Beside Her is an intricately plotted WWII espionage novel weaving together mystery, action, friendship, and a hint of romance perfect for fans of The Rose Code and Code Name Helene.

Justine Byrne can’t trust the people working beside her. Arlington Hall, a former women’s college in Virginia has been taken over by the United States Army where hundreds of men and women work to decode countless pieces of communication coming from the Axis powers.

Justine works among them, handling the most sensitive secrets of World War II—but she isn’t there to decipher German codes—she’s there to find a traitor.

Justine keeps her guard up and her ears open, confiding only in her best friend, Georgette, a fluent speaker of Choctaw who is training to work as a code talker. Justine tries to befriend each suspect, believing that the key to finding the spy lies not in cryptography but in understanding how code breakers tick. When young women begin to go missing at Arlington Hall, her deadline for unraveling the web of secrets becomes urgent and one thing remains clear: a single secret in enemy hands could end thousands of lives.

“A fascinating and intelligent WWII home front story.”

~ Rhys Bowen, New York Times bestselling author for The Physicists’ Daughter

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